I've just rediscovered this game and it finally works really well now. I absolutely love it. However, I do have some questions.

1. Is there any mechanism of puppet states in this game, and a mechanism for releasing puppet states out of what you control such as in Hearts of Iron?2. I am currently playing as the United Kingdom in the 1880 campaign and I wonder whether colonial wars such as Anglo-Egyptian War of 1882 are scripted events or whether I should declare the war myself?3. Is there any mechanism concerning spheres of influence other than events such as take over customs and rail concessions?4. I am currently expanding my colonial penetration in Mombasa where an Omani city is present. Do I have to conquer the city in order to capture the territory or can I use colonial decisions to do so?5. How can I modernize my ships such as from Ironclad Battleships to Steel Battleships? Shall I disband old units and replace them with new ones?6. The show AI save games option is not working. I would like to play head-to-head in an existing campaign but I can't do so. Is there any way to make this save game show allowing me to take over an AI country? What about taking over a country that is not one of the main powers available?7. Does lowering the taxes have a positive influence on the amount of private capital?8. I can't seem to be able to avoid private capital shortages - assets balance show a massive income vs spending - 1393 to 109, but I'm still not having enough every turn which leads to inflation.

Anyway, thanks for making this game finally playable and really enjoyable! It really is way better than Victoria 2 now.

3 - time works here, if you have a colony etc even out of your SoI, the situation will slowly improve. Think of it as the other states coming to accept your borish bad manners in taking something that was not originally yours ..

4 - CP and Military Control are separate items, if you can push CP to protectorate/colony status then you get the territory. But it often helps to take military control too as you can protect your buildings etc

5 - once you reach level 4 (ie the sail ships are obsolete), its a case of scrap and build (and pay the prestige price). The result is a very realistic portrayal of the chaos in naval design from say 1880 to 1910 (when everyone came to agree that the best design was an all big gun battleship and that other ships had to specialise around this). Its expensive and hard to keep up.

7 - not directly, but it may improve sales and usage of your commercial fleet - both indirectly may give you more buying and thus more capital

8 - tricky one. Best advice is to build up a large buffer but that can be hard in the 1880 scenario. Certainly don't build for a few turns and let the stock improve, then look at your trade pattern (this can see a lot of capital lost if you are not careful)

have fun

AJE The Hero, The Traitor and The BarbarianPoN Manufacturing Italy; A clear bright sunRoP The Mightiest Empires FallWIA Burning down the Houses; Wars in America; The Tea Wars

Regarding inflation:1. I'm not building anything for a few turns. Doesn't help. All of my shipyards are showing around -50 capital balance, I shut them all, along with other factories that are at loss - canned food, furniture and some that are producing goods. 2. The problem seems to be that I cannot sell enough on the markets - the demand is very low. So theoretically I'm trying to sell like 200 goods every turn but in reality I'm selling maybe 20. It shows that I should make several thousand profit but really I'm at loss. 3. I tried signing commercial agreements to boost my exports, didn't work.

Is there anything I can do to boost my exports or make production more profitable? The worst part is - I don't really know what costs so much that I lose several hundred every turn despite the message log showing that imports cost me less than I gain from exports and additionally I should be getting quite a nice sum from the internal trade and the trade with the colonies. So far, with two inflation reductions per year, I'm accumulating about 20% of inflation per year.

Things to look at - your population will buy so many common and food good types (you can see the limit in F4), but also demand variety, So you can't fill up all that local demand without a full range (the UK should be well placed for this but its still a problem).

I'd suggest do the extreme solution.

Shut down everything. Before you do work out how much PC you are using per turn at the moment, how much you need to reduce this by and then add in a safety net.

Only open production up to this limit. See if it all settles down (as above keep a variety of things in production so some might be loss making but you can sell the goods and get capital that way).

Its a bit tedious, but I've had to do it a few times to resolve problems with lack of coal etc

The second part of the initial post in this thread turned out to be bad advise (ignore it), but the first part is a solid way to get your capital income to grow in the early game. It takes a lot of micro management to set things up initially, but once you've got your factories turned on/off as needed and buy orders placed for other necessities, you should see decent growth in your capital income.

Remember it takes several turns for buy sell orders to become dependable, so don't set that part up for at least 2-3 turns. 1880 is a later start and resource sites cost a lot more due to later tech buildings in your build pools, so it may take a lot longer to get a dependable stock of resources fleshed out. But with patience (and closing of a lot of factories and sites you can't support at game start) you should be able to stabilize your economy in a few years or so.